Letter from L.A.

How Do You Solve a Problem Like moca?

In L.A.’s art world, topic one is moca: its director, Jeffrey Deitch; the spate of angry departures from its board; founding chairman Eli Broad’s own, new museum; and talk of a merger with U.S.C., or even with arch-rival lacma.

‘Platinum” tables went for $100,000 and “gold” for $50,000 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s sold-out Art + Film Gala in late October, and even at those prices, tables were packed so tightly into the mammoth tent set up in the museum’s central plaza that waiters had a hard time serving guests their Filet of Beef Wellington—not to mention the Laurent-Perrier champagne. The black-tie affair was co-chaired by Leonardo DiCaprio and Eva Chow, the wife of restaurateur Michael Chow and a member of the museum’s board, and underwritten by Gucci. It honored the artist Ed Ruscha and the late film director Stanley Kubrick, whose epic career was the subject of an exhibition opening to the public the following week. Hollywood royals were there in force, including Jack Nicholson, Jane Fonda, Warren Beatty and Annette Bening, Diane Keaton, Ryan O’Neal, Tom Hanks, Cameron Diaz, Salma Hayek, Robert Pattinson, and Steven Spielberg, along with a clutch of industry insiders who sit on lacma’s powerhouse board—CAA partner Bryan Lourd, producers Brian Grazer and Steve Tisch, and journalist Willow Bay, accompanied by her husband, Disney chairman Robert Iger. Pomegranate-juice queen and longtime board member Lynda Resnick—who, along with her husband, Stewart, gave the museum $55 million in 2008 to build the Renzo Piano-designed exhibition pavilion named after them—air-kissed Elaine Wynn, the bejeweled ex-wife of casino king Steve Wynn and one of the board’s newest members. Most of California’s greatest artists were there, too, from conceptualist pioneer John Baldessari to video maestro Bill Viola.

lacma board co-chair Terry Semel, the former C.E.O. of Yahoo, led off the speeches, boasting about the museum’s agreement with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to have Renzo Piano and Zoltan Pali convert the former May Company department store at the west end of lacma’s campus into the largest film museum in the world. Then came lacma’s director, Michael Govan, in a Gucci tuxedo, to shout out even more good news: “This has been our best year ever! Attendance is up to 1.3 million! To borrow a phrase from Ed Ruscha, ‘Los Angeles County Museum is on fire!’ ”

But that’s not what people really wanted to talk about that night. They wanted to talk about—almost couldn’t stop talking about—moca, the Museum of Contemporary Art, lacma’s troubled rival institution, 10 miles away in downtown Los Angeles. Was its controversial director, Jeffrey Deitch, the New York art dealer, installed only two years ago, staying or going? Was moca’s board, recently beefed up with the addition of Hollywood superagent Ari Emanuel and Wall Street hedge-fund giant Steven Cohen, really behind him 100 percent, as its co-chair Maria Arena Bell, who was at the gala, told everyone? Did moca’s polarizing founding chairman and lifetime trustee, Eli Broad, one of the city’s richest men and its biggest collector, have a secret plan to absorb it into his own museum, currently under construction across the street from moca’s main building, on Grand Avenue? (The museum’s second building, the Geffen Contemporary, in nearby Little Tokyo, was named for the entertainment mogul and art collector David Geffen in 1996, after he gave $5 million, but it is generally assumed that he will have nothing further to do with moca as long as his perennial enemy Eli Broad is involved.) Another question on everyone’s mind: Why was Deitch having such a hard time when two other New York transplants—Govan, who had come to lacma from the Dia Art Foundation, and Hammer Museum director Annie Philbin, who had run SoHo’s Drawing Center—were succeeding so spectacularly?

The ongoing brouhaha at moca came to a head last summer, when the four artists on its board—Baldessari, Ruscha, Barbara Kruger, and Catherine Opie—resigned to protest the ouster of the museum’s longtime chief curator, Paul Schimmel, who had clashed repeatedly with Deitch. “It’s a long story. A lot of it is sad,” says Los Angeles Times art critic Christopher Knight. “I don’t think there are really any villains, or evil people running around trying to do evil things. I think it’s a classic case of the road to hell being paved with good intentions.”

There are those, however, including Eli Broad, Maria Bell, and Jeffrey Deitch, who would consider Knight as Paul Schimmel’s mouthpiece, and Schimmel as the mastermind of a campaign to drive Deitch out, although they won’t say this in so many words, because of a mutual non-disparagement agreement between moca and Schimmel. At a dinner three weeks before the lacma gala, Broad told me he thought the Los Angeles Times had a “vendetta” against moca, which in actuality was “doing great.” When I called Broad’s office a few days later to discuss pursuing an article about the museum, his in-house communications executive, Karen Denne, said there really wasn’t much going on at moca, and suggested that I write a piece on the new Broad Art Museum, at Michigan State University (Broad’s alma mater), and its architect, Zaha Hadid, instead.

The Broad View

Eli Broad, who made his billions in housing construction and retirement insurance and gives away hundreds of millions annually through his foundations for education, medical research, and the arts, traces his role at moca back to its founding, in 1979. He was one of the first three supporters to donate $1 million, and in exchange was named chairman of the board. He personally recruited its first director, Pontus Hulten, from the Pompidou Center, in Paris, but they fell out two years later, and Hulten left. Broad also personally negotiated the purchase of 80 major Abstract Expressionist and Pop-art works from fellow board member Count Giuseppe Panza di Biumo for a bargain $11 million. Substantial gifts in the late 1980s from other founding members helped moca amass what is generally considered the most impressive permanent collection of contemporary art in the country. By then Broad, displeased with moca’s next director, Richard Koshalek, whom he had also recruited, had stepped down as chairman and established the Broad Art Foundation in a renovated industrial building near the ocean in Santa Monica, where its rapidly expanding collection of Lichtensteins, Schnabels, and Cindy Shermans was open to visitors by appointment only.

In 1996, Broad joined lacma’s board, as vice-chairman, and a new saga began. In 2001 the county museum mounted an exhibition titled “Jasper Johns to Jeff Koons: Four Decades of Art from the Broad Collections.”In 2003, Broad pledged $50 million to erect the Broad Contemporary Art Museum at lacma. In 2006, Govan was hired, largely on Broad’s say-so. In January 2008, one month before the grand opening of BCAM (the Broad building’s nickname), Broad announced he would not be giving his collection (by then valued at $1.9 billion) to lacma, publicly humiliating Govan, who quietly let it be known that he was actually relieved not to have to store and insure the vast number of second-rate works it contained. That spring, Broad revealed his plan to build his own museum, though not its location, hinting that the municipalities of Santa Monica, Culver City, and Los Angeles were all vying to have it within their borders.

Meanwhile, over on Grand Avenue, moca was melting down. In December 2008, the press reported that the museum’s endowment had dwindled in nine years from $40 million to $6 million, and that California’s attorney general was investigating its finances. Govan, with a promise of funding from Geffen, proposed a merger of lacma and moca. But Broad swooped in with a pledge of $30 million to keep moca afloat and independent. A Letter of Agreement between moca and the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation was signed on December 23, 2008. Half of the money was an “Exhibition Pledge,” to be paid in quarterly installments of $750,000 over the following five years. The other $15 million was a “Match Pledge,” to be paid in amounts equal to contributions by other donors as they were received. (So far, Broad has had to match about $6.25 million.) Two notable clauses require the museum “to strengthen its Board of Trustees to include a substantial number of individuals who share moca’s vision of downtown Los Angeles and art” and “to acknowledge Eli Broad as the founding chairman of the Board of moca.”

“That line set me back on my heels, because it is just so Eli,” says Christopher Knight. “Like a lot of first-generation multi-billionaires, he’s a complete control freak. And he doesn’t like to spend his own money. He likes to coerce people to spend their money, and the whole development of Grand Avenue has been along those lines.” Lifetime trustee Lenore Greenberg, whose mother, Rita Schreiber, gave moca works by Pollock, Gorky, Rothko, Miró, Mondrian, and Giacometti, says of the agreement, “There were all those strings attached, which I call ropes with nooses on the end. We were precluded from doing any kind of merger because of accepting Eli’s money.”

moca’s director of 10 years, Jeremy Strick, resigned, and Charles E. Young, former chancellor of U.C.L.A., was brought in as interim C.E.O. Young proceeded to trim the staff, cut the operating budget, and save money on exhibitions by putting the permanent collection on view for most of 2009. Broad persuaded several prominent international art collectors, including Interview owner Peter Brant, London jeweler Laurence Graff, and Ukrainian industrialist Victor Pinchuk, to come on the board. New members are asked to pay a onetime fee of $250,000 if they are based in Los Angeles, $150,000 if they live elsewhere; annual dues are $75,000. The board’s co-chairs, Maria Bell, who was executive producer and scriptwriter of the TV soap opera The Young and the Restless, and entertainment lawyer David Johnson, had assumed their positions a few months before the meltdown and are considered firm Broad allies. Along with Broad, they are the dominant players on the 10-member executive committee, which, after a year-long search, chose Jeffrey Deitch as the new director.

Deitch Comes Aboard

The art world was stunned. If there had ever been a case of a dealer becoming the director of a serious museum, no one could recall it. Whereas most museum directors have advanced degrees in fine arts, Deitch’s master’s was from Harvard Business School. And he had no experience running a nonprofit organization. On the other hand, Deitch’s creative credentials seemed well suited for an institution devoted exclusively to contemporary art. Even while running Citibank’s art-advisory department in the late 70s and early 80s, he had formed tight friendships with the emerging young artists of that era, including the late Jean-Michel Basquiat and the late Keith Haring. From 1988 to 1996, Deitch worked as a private dealer and adviser to cutting-edge collectors, most notably the Greek billionaire Dakis Joannou.

Deitch Projects, as he named his SoHo gallery, was launched in 1996 with a Vanessa Beecroft performance-art piece featuring many nearly nude women. The Russian conceptualist Oleg Kulik spent two weeks in 1997 at the gallery “living like a dog” for a show titled “I Bite America and America Bites Me.” Deitch developed a reputation as a dealer who would do anything for his artists, and among his important discoveries were Cecily Brown, Dan Colen, and Kehinde Wiley. He nearly went bankrupt underwriting Jeff Koons’s multi-million-dollar sculpture series “Celebration,” but Koons’s largest collector, Eli Broad, saved the day by agreeing to pay a higher price than originally agreed upon to cover cost overruns.

moca’s press release announcing Deitch’s appointment, on January 11, 2010, carried supportive statements from Glenn Lowry, director of the Museum of Modern Art, in New York, and Michael Govan, who said Deitch would be “a welcome addition to the growing art scene in Los Angeles.” Culture Monster, the *Los Angeles Times’*s closely followed art blog, however, had a word of caution from Selma Holo, director of the Fisher Museum of Art, at the University of Southern California (U.S.C.): “We would be remiss not to ask ourselves how [Deitch] and moca are planning to make the transition from the world of commerce and its values to another universe. One understands that these worlds blend, but there are still or should be some lines that are not crossed.”

Gary Cypres, a Los Angeles businessman who was brought in to advise moca after the 2008 crisis, and who would head the board’s finance committee until March 2012, also had reservations: “I had no problem with Jeffrey’s knowledge of contemporary art or his success as a gallery owner, but I thought he might not be the appropriate fund-raiser. Charles Young had stabilized everything, and moca needed stability and time to rebuild. But Eli and the powers that be decided to take a risk. They made a controversial choice—certainly to the art world—and that created another issue that they really didn’t need. They rolled the dice, and instead of stability, they got more instability.”

After closing his business in New York, Deitch took up his position at moca in June 2010. His first show, a Dennis Hopper retrospective, opened on July 11. Although Hopper was best known as the director and star of Easy Rider, his photographs had been exhibited in museums in Europe. The retrospective, however, also included the paintings and sculptures he had been making since the early 1960s, and it took up the entire 55,000-square-foot Geffen building. Hopper died six weeks before the opening, and the show did not go over well with the natives. “Hopper’s work as a photographer and a painter and all of that stuff was virtually unknown in New York,” complains Christopher Knight, “so when Jeffrey came to L.A., he thought this was going to be a great big revelation to everyone. Well, that stuff has been kicking around here for years! I think it was a very provincial move on the part of the new director of a museum that has an international reputation.”

Paul Schimmel would have nothing to do with a Hopper show, so Deitch enlisted Hopper’s good friend Julian Schnabel, the New York painter, to install it. “That was the first indication that traditional curatorial rigor was not going to be a feature of what moca was going to do going forward,” says Knight. Deitch’s decision to allow the young actor James Franco, who was in town for an episode of General Hospital, to stage a “Soap at moca” night that summer only fed the argument that the museum’s new director was mistaking Los Angeles for Hollywood.

Compounding the problem, Deitch attempted to postpone a long-planned retrospective of the work of Jack Goldstein, a multi-media artist highly regarded in Los Angeles, who had committed suicide in 2003. Senior curator Philipp Kaiser, who was responsible for the show, left moca to become director of the Ludwig Museum, in Cologne, and the retrospective was promptly picked up by the Orange County Museum of Art. Deitch’s critics claim that he was uncommunicative with Schimmel and the other curators. His defenders say it was the other way around.

Irving Blum, the dean of Los Angeles art dealers, told me, “Jeffrey had a tough start due largely to the poisonous personality of Schimmel, who really put him down at every opportunity. The guy’s a brilliant curator but, finally, too divisive. I think a big mistake that Jeffrey made was not getting rid of Schimmel right at the start.” (Paul Schimmel declined to comment.)

Catherine Opie feels differently: “The curators were telling me that, all of a sudden, 70 percent of the curatorial side was going to be run by Jeffrey. That’s a huge problem. You’ve got people there who have invested years and years of scholarly research for their next shows. And that needed to be honored.”

Yet, the museum’s biggest success in terms of attendance since Deitch’s appointment was his own “Art in the Streets,” a comprehensive survey of graffiti and street art from the 1970s to the present. Featuring 50 artists, it attracted a record-breaking 201,352 visitors during its four-month run at the Geffen Contemporary. The artist known as Retna recalls introducing Deitch to his fellow taggers: “Jeffrey was real open, and a lot of times you don’t get that from other curators or directors. He was hanging out in the hood with some of the street guys, and he didn’t seem to discriminate on where he would go, which was kind of cool.”

When I asked Lenore Greenberg if she had seen “Art in the Streets,” she said, “I saw it. They keep referring to the show that had the biggest attendance in the history of moca. I doubt that very seriously. And the people who came were not people who were going to turn out to be donors or continue their attendance. It was a one-off.”

Taking Sides

Two days after the lacma gala, I went to see Jeffrey Deitch at his office at moca. He was wearing one of his trademark pastel-colored, custom-made Italian suits—it was lemon yellow that day. His mood, however, was anything but sunny. He was defensive about his shows and his strategy and eager to emphasize that “the voting members on the board are very strongly behind me, even in the face of all this controversy, a lot of which doesn’t have anything to do with reality.”

The criticism of the Dennis Hopper show, he said, “was almost incomprehensible. Here is this great figure in our culture who is dying, who has never had a museum exhibition in Los Angeles. And the general audience was so appreciative and responsive. There were a number of people here who said, ‘You can’t do this. This is not right for moca.’ So I went to Ed Ruscha and said, ‘If you think that I shouldn’t do this show, I’m not going to do it.’ He said, ‘Do the show. It’s really important.’ ”

Deitch continued, “One of the best results of ‘Art in the Streets’ was that it transformed the lives of a number of the artists who were in it, people who were not part of the mainstream dialogue of contemporary art, like Retna. Gusmano Cesaretti, a great photographer, is now showing at major galleries. Rammellzee went from our show to the Museum of Modern Art. That was one of my goals—it’s both discovering young people and re-discovering these giants who have somehow ended up in obscurity.” He ticked off shows he considered his successes, including those devoted to the noir photojournalist Weegee, the underground filmmaker Kenneth Anger, the neo-Maoist painter Cai Guo-Qiang, and two young mixed-media artists, Amanda Ross-Ho and Ryan Trecartin. He said he was most proud of last spring’s “The Painting Factory: Abstraction After Warhol,” adding, “Of the 350 shows I have organized in my career, it was one of the most perfectly realized.”

As to the charge that a director’s job is not to curate shows, Deitch argued, “The first director of moca was Pontus Hulten, who curated exhibitions. Many of the museum directors who make an impact personally curate exhibitions. Nicholas Serota curates exhibitions at the Tate Modern. I make the extra effort of working weekends and vacations to do this. It’s not that I’m taking time away from the administrative side—I’m here every day raising money. This is why I was brought here. In my initial talks with the board, I had a list of exhibitions that I was going to do, including ‘Art in the Streets’ and ‘The Painting Factory.’ The board was super-enthusiastic.”

Deitch also diplomatically complimented Paul Schimmel’s last show at moca, which had opened three weeks earlier, “Destroy the Picture: Painting the Void, 1949–1962,” a revelatory survey of abstract innovators including Lucio Fontana, Yves Klein, and Lee Bontecou. “So we’re doing excellent exhibitions,” he concluded. “The thing that is most demoralizing is this distorted interpretation of what we’re doing—that it’s celebrity art.”

The Crisis

After 22 years as moca’s chief curator, Schimmel resigned, or was fired, depending on whom you are talking to, on June 28, 2012, in Eli Broad’s office at the Broad Foundation, in Westwood. A week later, the Los Angeles Times reported, “Normally, museum directors hire and fire employees without board involvement or authorization. But, Broad said, ‘the leadership felt that getting Jeffrey Deitch involved would create a bad scene which wouldn’t serve anybody.’ ” The paper also reported, “With Schimmel’s departure, the curatorial staff has shrunk from five to three under Deitch, and the museum board says there are no plans to replace the chief curator. Instead, moca will deploy more guest curators.”

The following day, July 8, Broad published an op-ed piece in the paper, seeking to cast a positive light on Deitch’s tenure by citing moca’s increased attendance and endowment. In response, four life trustees, led by Lenore Greenberg, wrote a letter to the editor: “Restoring the artistic and curatorial integrity of moca is crucial in regaining its respect and prominence. The celebrity-driven program that moca director Jeffrey Deitch promotes is not the answer.” They called for the hiring of additional curators and a new director.

On July 12, John Baldessari announced that he was leaving moca’s board, to protest both Schimmel’s ouster and, as he told The New York Times, the “entertainment mentality” introduced by Deitch. Barbara Kruger and Catherine Opie resigned the next day, and Ed Ruscha three days later. Ruscha explained to me, “I’ve always liked Jeffrey, but I resented them letting Paul Schimmel go, because he was like a flashlight in the dark.”

“It was a huge statement for all of us to leave,” said Opie. “But we weren’t even told that Paul was going to be let go—none of the board knew of this before it hit the press. I think the executive committee knew, but that’s it.” Opie said she had felt for some time that she wasn’t making an impact as a board member, particularly after she donated a portfolio of her prints, worth $150,000, to be sold in order to save the job of senior education-program manager Aandrea Stang. “They accepted the gift, but then they fired her.” Opie added that curators had complained to her and Kruger about the lack of communication with Deitch. “We said to Jeffrey, ‘You need to talk to people. You may be used to running a gallery in which you get to make all the decisions, but a museum is a collective. We would be happy to be liaisons for you.’ ” She said Deitch ignored their offer.

On July 22, Roberta Smith, the New York Times art critic, published an article titled “A Los Angeles Museum on Life Support.” After noting that she had considered Deitch’s hiring “a brilliant stroke,” she went on to write, “It was certainly not beyond the realm of possibility that given Mr. Deitch’s wide art world experience he could have met the challenge of a big museum. But instead of redefining himself in a bid to do that, he seems to have redefined the job.”

“I think the events this summer, and then the relentless press, was really unfortunate for moca,” Maria Bell told me. “Especially at a time when, if you went and visited moca, you would have seen that incredible ‘Painting Factory’ show. You would have seen the super-scholarly show by Philipp Kaiser about earth art. So it’s ironic that there has been all this criticism about this supposed program. It’s really just been a lot of rumors. And it shows you how dangerous rumors can be.”

“I think the press has been very helpful, because they kept the story alive,” countered Lenore Greenberg. “First of all, I think Eli has had to declare himself. He had to say that he didn’t want to take over moca’s collection, which I think he originally wanted to do. I don’t think he wanted to take over moca itself, because I don’t think he wanted to spend the money to run two museums. I think what he really was aiming at was that moca would share its collection with his museum. I think he wanted moca to be kept alive because he wanted to have the critical mass of two museums on Grand Avenue.”

What Next?

Back in New York in early November, when the international art world congregates for the sales at the big auction houses, I kept running into people who were perplexed by the attacks on Deitch in the press. “If I were Jeffrey, I would come back to New York as fast as I could. Why stick around to take any more abuse?” said former Warhol colleague Vincent Fremont. “What I don’t understand is how what should have been the perfect fit has turned into the perfect train wreck,” said video artist Marco Brambilla, adding, half-jokingly, “Maybe Jeffrey took the job as a conceptual-art piece.”

Performance-art diva Marina Abramović approached me at a benefit for Independent Curators International in order to volunteer a positive comment about Deitch. “Jeffrey covers the gray area that nobody else covers, the kind of art on the edge of everything. He’s like a thermometer of the new spirit of our time. About the politics, about Eli Broad—these are all things I don’t know much about. I just want to say that the person Jeffrey Deitch is extremely important to the art world.”

In late November, I had a voice mail from a well-placed source in Los Angeles. “As I speak moca is signing a deal with U.S.C. to take the museum over, manage it, pay its expenses, so that lacma won’t get ahold of it.” When I called back, the individual said Broad had apparently made the deal with U.S.C. board chairman Edward Roski Jr., C.E.O. of one of the largest real-estate companies in the nation. (In 2006, Roski gave $23 million to U.S.C.’s art school, which was renamed after his wife, Gayle Garner Roski.) The source noted that, although Ed Roski sits on lacma’s board, Michael Govan didn’t know about the deal, which was to be announced on November 30. No announcement was forthcoming, but in response to a Los Angeles Times inquiry, U.S.C. provost Elizabeth Garrett said talks about a “possible partnership” were “very preliminary.”

In December, I joined the art pack at Miami Art Basel, where the latest rumors were that the U.S.C. deal with moca might be off. In a telephone interview, moca trustee Lauren King, of the Texas King Ranch dynasty, said, “That I definitely can’t discuss. There’s more than one organization that they’re talking to.” She added, “I don’t know if Jeffrey was a wise choice. But I have to say the board is behind him. He’s not the brilliant fund-raiser that Michael Govan is, but he brings something else. He’s got his finger on the pulse. He’s got incredible gifts of art in the last couple of years. I think it takes a while to get up and running, so we have to give him a chance.” I asked if the board had plans to hire a new chief curator. “That’s not on the front burner right now,” King said.

In Miami, I had breakfast with Deitch. He was much more upbeat than he had been in California. When I asked about a deal with U.S.C., he said, “I’m very excited about it. The combination would be amazing. But there’s nothing to say beyond the terse statement released by the university.” He talked with great enthusiasm about a show called “Fire in the Disco,” which is still in the planning stages. Like “Art in the Streets,” he believes it will attract the young audience, who are interested equally in music, fashion, and art. He calls it “a grand vision,” which will include photographic and video documentation of the history of disco, model rooms of dance palaces, including Studio 54, disco-related artworks by Warhol, Basquiat, Kenny Scharf, and Ólafur Elíasson, and a functioning club with electronic music provided by the star D.J.’s James Murphy and Tiësto.

He confirmed that the funding was in place for his next show, a retrospective of the work of Urs Fischer, the 39-year-old Swiss neo-Dadaist sculptor. He added, “We are going to create a new model of how to present a solo show of a contemporary artist.” That will be followed by a huge Jeff Koons retrospective, organized with the Whitney Museum and the first in this country. “Coming up in 2014!,” Deitch pronounced happily.

By the middle of January, however, the essential question seemed to be not whither Deitch but whither moca. I learned that the negotiations with U.S.C. were going forward, driven by a determined Eli Broad, but that the moca board was divided. In a surprising twist, many members wanted to reconsider a merger or partnership with lacma.